Uncategorized

After a federal judge ordered the New York City Police Department to stop violating the rights of innocent people, all NYC Mayor Michael Bloomberg could do was whine about the potential dangers of respecting the rights of the innocent.

For more than a decade, New York City police have randomly stopped pedestrians and questioned them, then frisked them for weapons. Bloomberg defends the program as saving lives, but he doesn’t understand that we have constitutional rights that protect us against unreasonable searches. He doesn’t get to decide when to ignore our rights.

Since 2004, NYC police have made 4.4 million stops and frisked 2.3 million people. Federal Judge Shira Scheindlin noted in her ruling that no weapons were found in 98.5 percent of the frisks. That means that nearly all of those 2.3 million people searched for weapons were innocent — and the searches took place without cause and without any guilt on their part.

Under the NYC program, there didn’t have to be any reason to suspect anyone. Police were encouraged to search more and more people — and the real-world results have been that the vast majority of those searched have been young black and Hispanic men. The judge called it a form of racial profiling.

Keep Reading

This is the time in the election cycle when I’m starting to hear from a lot of people asking for support in the 2014 election. Some people want moral support. Others want money. (Well, they all want money.)

Many of them are good people and I like a lot of them. But I can’t support any of them in good conscience, because I can’t support the system they’ve chosen to join. To save myself from having to reply to every candidate personally and explain the reason, let me explain to everybody all at once.

If you’re running for office, I don’t necessarily oppose you personally, but I oppose the entire system of coercion that majoritarianism represents. You’re probably a decent person. You probably mean well. But for anything to change, the entire structure of the system has to change. Just electing you — or even hundreds or thousands of people like you — isn’t going to change anything.

If you grew up in this country, you were probably taught to revere the political system that’s in place. You heard propaganda in school about how great the system was. You were taught that “democracy” and “freedom” mean the same thing. (You were lied to.) You were taught the fiction that if honest men (and women) would just “do the right things,” the system would produce peace, prosperity and freedom for all. After all, it worked in “Mr. Smith Goes to Washington,” didn’t it?

Keep Reading

Do you have enough neighbors whose skin color is different from your own? The U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development has proposed new rules that are aimed at forcing changes to neighborhoods that it deems to not be racially mixed enough.

When I first read something about this a month or so back, it was just on a few conservative fringe news sites, so I was hesitant to take it seriously. Surely the Obama administration couldn’t think it had the legal power or even moral right to decide where people should live. If mostly working class whites live in one neighborhood and mostly middle class blacks in another, so what? Nobody would be insane enough to think the government should force people to change their voluntary decisions about where they want to live and who they want to live around.

But now that U.S. News and World Report is writing about it — and confirming the gist of what I’d read before — I have to take this insane story seriously. The busybodies in Washington really have decided to use your tax money to socially engineer where people live. Here are the proposed rules, which are currently in a 60-day public comment period.

The Obama administration doesn’t think it’s reasonable that people tend to choose to live around people who are a lot like them. Those social engineers think it’s OK for them to rig the system in ways that will produce neighborhoods with mixes they like — when it comes to both race and income levels.

Keep Reading